Book Review: Cormac McCarthy - The Road

If you liked the brutal Texas shootouts of No Country For Old Men and the relentless Wild West slaughter of Blood Meridian, this lighthearted tale of a father protecting his son from the ravaged remnants of society in a brutal post-apocalyptic American wasteland will be right up your alley! All the hallmarks of McCarthy are present: gorgeous prose of near-Biblical cadence, constant violence, dialogue without quotation marks, fantastic and surreal landscapes, characters without names... they're here and they're great. There are a lot of subtle touches that make the simple survive-and-protect plot especially effective, like the fact in all their lonely and wanderings across the ruins of the country you never find out where they are, which makes the story take on a much more universal and haunting pallor than it might have otherwise. This is an extremely affecting book that sticks with you for a long time.